Chapter 1075: Into the Wolf’s Den

Fifteen minutes later, the Alpha came back. Elder Wolf and the Handsome Huge Wolf stood as well. Xia Qing had run for twenty minutes before she finally ran out of steam and climbed onto the back of the Handsome Huge Wolf to keep going with the team.

The team—one human, six wolves—wove through the mountains, stopping and starting as they moved. Thanks to the wolves being alert to changes around them, they avoided packs of large, fierce beasts. But Xia Qing soon lost count of the aggressive Devastation Evolution plants they encountered. She even came across three rare Yi Evolution plants.

Over three hours later, when the team stumbled onto a group of herbivores Xia Qing couldn’t even name, the Northern Wolf Pack caught two and Elder Wolf got one. They all started to dig in.

Taking advantage of the break, Xia Qing set up a simple tent and ducked inside to handle some personal business. Just as she was about to take down the tent, the distant roar of a helicopter began to approach.

She rushed outside and found the wolves already hiding under a massive rock, each clutching its prey. Even Little Wolf’s little sister flattened herself against the stone, motionless, instinctively evading the helicopter’s radar scan.

Eleven years into the catastrophe, it wasn’t just humans adapting quickly—the animals of the Evolved Forest were too.

Once the helicopter passed overhead, Xia Qing pulled out her phone, synced with the satellite, and checked her coordinates. Comparing with her offline map, she realized she’d run with the wolf pack all the way to Mount Twenty-Six, on the border between Hui One and Hui Three in the Evolved Forest!

Go just a bit farther south from Hui Three’s Mount Thirty-Six and you’d reach Hui One’s Mount Twenty-Nine.

This spot was 320 li in a straight line from Xia Qing’s own territory.

She’d been running in circles with a pack of wolves and somehow ended up hundreds of li away!

Judging by the time and the sun’s position, Xia Qing confirmed that helicopter had just traveled over Hui Three’s airspace—the Hui Three Base’s patrol bird. The patrols were meant to stop Fire Phoenix and Apocalypse members fleeing after the big battle from escaping into the Evolved Forest of Hui Three Base.

Xia Qing let out a breath and put away her phone and tent. Once the wolves finished eating, they kept moving.

After another twenty minutes pushing south, Elder Wolf led the Northern Wolf Pack and Xia Qing into a long, narrow gorge. Jagged peaks towered on either side and strange rocks jutted in all directions.

Judging by the terrain, they’d definitely entered the boundary between Hui One and Hui Three.

Xia Qing picked up her pace to catch up with Elder Wolf and asked quietly, “Number Four, are we almost there? It gets dangerous if we go any further ahead.”

The wolves wore no identification. Wherever they went, they were considered large animals that humans were forbidden from attacking without cause. But Xia Qing only had Hui Three’s identification badge. If she entered Hui One’s Evolved Forest without official permission, she’d be branded an intruder. If she ran into people from Hui One, they could rob her or even kill her without facing any legal consequences.

Elder Wolf didn’t answer, just continued along the valley, heading northeast for another ten minutes. They evaded another radar sweep from a helicopter, then Elder Wolf tried to scramble into a rock crevice more than four meters off the ground, partially hidden by shrubs.

Xia Qing lifted him up, then followed inside. The Alpha left the Handsome Huge Wolf and Crippled Wolf to guard the entrance, while he took Black Wolf and Little Wolf’s little sister with him.

The terrain here reminded Xia Qing of the cave she and the Alpha had crawled into on Hill Thirty-Seven in Hui Three’s west, on their way to the sniper’s perch a few days back. But this cave sloped downward, and the air inside was dry.

What stood out as odd was that no wild animals lived in this cave.

That left two possibilities: either there was poison here, scaring away small animals, or it was human territory—and had been cleared out. Xia Qing checked the Air Toxin Detector on her arm and, seeing the air was clean, thought the second option much more likely.

She told Elder Wolf to hang back and led the way herself with a pair of night vision goggles. There could be surveillance or traps ahead, set by humans. Elder Wolf was clever, but not familiar with human technology.

That was because this cave’s end probably housed her own kind—and those people might be Elder Wolf’s enemies. Anyone he considered an enemy was either a human who’d attacked him before, or one of those blue-skinned scavengers Yang Jin captured a few days ago.

Xia Qing suspected it was the latter.

That first evening when Elder Wolf came back to Section Three, Xia Qing had shown him Yang Jin’s video of the blue-skinned scavengers caught on Hill Forty-Seven, as well as a video of her, the Alpha, and the scavengers fighting on Hill Thirty-Seven. She wanted Elder Wolf to know their appearance. She’d also shown him the scavengers’ backpack she confiscated, warning him their medicine was dangerous and he should be careful if he encountered them.

Maybe Elder Wolf realized there were too many scavengers here for him to handle alone, so he returned home to get Xia Qing.

If that was the case, then Xia Qing was about to—

Strike it rich!

A few days ago, she’d confiscated the belongings and bags of nine scavengers, getting nine walnut-sized and five pigeon-egg-sized high-grade Yi Stones, seven more fragments of high-grade Yi Stone, a dozen points cards totaling 57,600 credits, over seventy-four strands of Evolved White Weasel Grass root, and a bunch of weapons and poisons.

If this was the blue-skinned scavengers’ lair, then the loot here would easily surpass what she found on those nine!

Would Xia Qing feel guilty about taking their stuff?

Absolutely not!

These guys were notorious criminals wanted by Hui One, high on the bounty list. They used cruel methods to control Evolved Wolves and Huge Evolved Lizards and were trying to hunt Evolved Wolves and Tigers in Hui Three’s western Evolved Forest. They were hired by Xia Qing’s enemies to trigger a beast tide and overrun her territory!

As they made it within forty meters of their target, the cave floor leveled off and the ceiling dropped to just over forty centimeters high. Xia Qing put her backpack in a rock crevice and crawled another twenty meters forward, soon noticing the rock walls growing smoother.

“Wait a minute…”

Xia Qing reached out and touched some powder on the wall, then pinched it between her fingers. She immediately understood what this place was.

This was a… chimney! The powder on the wall was ash.

In the Evolved Forest, any visible cooking smoke from firewood is like a flare revealing your position. So if you absolutely need to start a fire, you have to ensure there’s no smoke.

There are a bunch of ways to do that. On flatlands, people usually dig a pit to build a stove, then hollow out several horizontal tunnels behind it to vent smoke away, covering the passages with dirt or branches to keep it from rising.

In mountainous areas, people use the same idea—finding spots with natural fissures in the stone for their cooking fires, so the smoke can disperse. The stove built in that Hidden Valley of Hill Fifty and the one in this gorge were made that way. The shrubs planted at the fissure’s exit must be there to block the cave entrance and scatter the smoke.

Anyone cooking here had to be human. No wonder so few animals lived in this mountain crevice. Animals aren’t stupid. In this sweltering heat, who’d want to live in a cave that billows black smoke two or three times a day?